Tuesday rebounds, the Box IPO and the Apple/Netflix call returns

By Shawn Langlois

Yet another reason to hate Mondays. Or perhaps to embrace them. Or maybe even treat them like any other day because you believe trends amount to squadoosh when it comes to investing. Whatever your stance, the numbers are forming an interesting statistical pattern.

For what it’s worth, the stock market has lost 0.4% on average so far this year on Mondays, with seven out of 10 days posting losses, according to Bespoke Investment Group. Not really that interesting until you see what Tuesday has done. The S&P has gained 0.56% on the second day of the week, with positive returns nine out of 11 times.

The pattern is holding today.

But let’s not waste time on these kind of numbers when we can revel in the potential the Box public offering is bringing to market. Can’t you just feel the excitement? Joe Donohue of the Upside Trader blog sure can.

“All the drek is filing to get off the IPO runway before interest completely disappears. Yet another cloud play. Hurry, the market is going lower on a daily basis. The bulge-bracket execs want this stuff gone and off their books,” he wrote.

Then again, Donohue had Duke advancing to invade Ukraine in the next round of the tournament, so what does he know?

The quote of the day: “In the economic crisis after World War I, there was no attempt at intervention or bailouts, and the economy came roaring back. In the S&L crisis, we liquidated the bad banks and their bad real-estate bets. Property prices fell, capitalist juices started to flow, and the economy came roaring back. This time around, we did not liquidate the guys who made the bad bets.” — Jeremy Grantham, the co-founder of money management firm GMO, tells Fortune.

The economy: The Commerce Department will report the year-on-year growth rate of new-home sales, and analysts are looking for it to slow to a 440,000 pace in February, from 468,000 in January. Elsewhere, a pair of home-price gauges, the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city composite and the FHFA house price index, will likely show muted moves in January.

Garnering plenty of attention this morning, Philly Fed President Charles Plosser said he can’t understand all the fuss over Yellen’s “six-month” comment last week. He sees short-term interest rates hitting 3% at the end of 2016, but he doesn’t see the Fed being aggressive. Plosser will be speaking again later, along with Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart.

Box is on its way to being a public company, and relative to the onslaught of other money-losers preparing to IPO, there were higher hopes for this one. Here’s why Business Insider describes it as an “old-school” IPO. We may be seeing a relative bounce in successful IPOs this year, but it probably won’t compete with the bubble days, as you can see by this tweeted chart.

The chart of the day:SocGen analyst Alain Bokobza used this illustration to lay out his firm’s latest investment strategy. His basic stance is that tapering is priced in and under-owned European assets should outperform their pricy U.S. counterparts. “In particular, we like the new momentum in the two countries that are lagging in terms of restructuring, i.e. Italy and France,” he wrote. “The European parliamentary elections, when we anticipate a 20% euro-sceptic outcome, should usher in a new balance with less ‘bad’ austerity measures and more growth-oriented structural reforms.”

The call of the day: “Rather than trying to compete with Netflix on a slow trajectory,” Apple
/quotes/zigman/68270/delayed/quotes/nls/aaplAAPL should just buy the company, says Jon Ogg on 24/7 Wall Street. This is nothing we haven’t heard before, countless times. Even our own Rex Crum tackled the idea a couple of years ago. But Ogg is running it out there again, in light of Apple’s talks with Comcast. “If Tim Cook wants to be a transformative CEO, he could use half-a-year’s worth of Apple’s profits to buy Netflix
/quotes/zigman/87598/delayed/quotes/nls/nflxNFLX outright and capture some 44 million members across many different systems outside of just Apple,” Ogg wrote. Read the rest of his post and also the comments section, where the idea was mostly dismissed with plenty of that Apple zealot flair.

Random reads: Katie Francis asks everyone she meets if they want to buy some Girl Scout Cookies … 18,107 boxes later, she has a new record.

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Need to Know (NTK) guides investors to the most important, insightful items required to chart a course ahead of each trading day. Anchored by lead writer Shawn Langlois, NTK will sift through the fire hose of news, commentary and data, from traditional and non-traditional sources, and extract what’s most essential. You can start reading NTK here as it begins publishing at approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, or sign up here to get a version in your email box every morning at approximately 8:45. a.m. ET.